A Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS or CDS) is a decision support system (DSS), which is designed to assist physicians and other health professionals with decision-making tasks, such as assigning tests or treatment for a patient. A clinical decision support system may be looked at as a knowledge system, which uses items of personal or medical data to provide medical case-specific advice.
CDSS may be used to assist clinicians at the point of care to decide whether and which examination or treatment to assign to their patient to help improve patient's care or diagnostic, while assessing the risks associated with the patient or with the system as a whole.
Predictive risk assessment models may use information driven from clinical tests, lifestyle and other personal and medical history details to predict a patient's future condition.
Current risk assessment models require a predetermined set of test results also referred to as biomarkers in order to perform. However there are cases where a subset of the biomarkers could provide the prediction with similar degree of confidence as the full model, thus making the additional tests redundant. Thus, models that require all biomarkers might in practice be performing unnecessary expensive, unpleasant or risky examinations, for example radiology scans or invasive pregnancy screening tests.
Some current models that can perform without all biomarkers may assume that values for the missing tests are randomly missing, or that the probability of the values being absent is known a-priori at the time of model generation.
Another set of models that can possibly perform without all biomarkers relates to decision trees. An examination can be avoided if a path from the root to the matching leaf does not involve the biomarkers corresponding to the examination. However, even if such a path exists, which may not be the case for all possible subsets, it is predefined at the model training time and cannot be dynamically adjusted at evaluation time to accommodate clinical state, personal preferences, financial limitations, resource availability, or other factors.
In view of the above, there is required a CDSS that may overcome the deficiencies of existing systems.